Curiosity and the Value of Truth
Abstract
This chapter focuses on the question of whether true belief can have final value because it answers our ‘intellectual interest’ or ‘natural curiosity’. The idea is that sometimes we are interested in the truth on some issue not for any ulterior purpose, but simply because we are curious about that issue. It is argued that this approach fails to provide an adequate explanation of the final value of true belief, since there is an unbridgeable gap between our valuing the truth on some issue for its own sake, and that truth's being valuable for its own sake.
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Debatable questions inherently lack fixed answers.
“reflecting human beings' natural curiosity about topics that inherently lack fixed answers (Lowry and Johnson, 1981;Brady, 2009).”
From DebateQA: Evaluating Question Answering on Debatable Knowledge (2026) · cites this paper as Brady, 2009
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DebateQA: Evaluating Question Answering on Debatable Knowledge
Xu, R., Qi, X., Qi, Z., Xu, W., & Guo, Z. (2026) · Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026 · doi:10.18653/v1/2026.findings-eacl.44 · Cited by 1 · see citing works
- Authors
- Brady, M. S.
- Corresponding author
- Brady, Michael S.
- ORCID
- Brady, Michael S.
- Venue
- Epistemic Value
- Publisher
- Oxford University PressOxford
- Published
- 2009-09-01
- Pages
- 265-283
- OpenAlex
- W22034770
- Cited by
- 45
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 4 · 2023: 16 · 2021: 3 · 2020: 2 · 2019: 2 · 2018: 3 · 2017: 1 · 2016: 2 · 2015: 3 · 2014: 1 · 2013: 2 · 2012: 1
- FWCI
- 8.65
- Type
- book chapter
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Philosophy › Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Philosophy › Philosophical Ethics and Theory
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Feminist Epistemology and Gender Studies
- Keywords
- curiosity, value of truth, true belief, intellectual interests, natural curiosities, epistemic value
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